Candy Crush Saga developer: revenue $1.88 billion, profit $568 million

[MoHasanie]

ioi said:

theprof00 said:
I don't understand how they can have 1.3b in overhead. That's insane. Did they buy all the programmers personal jets?

It is all advertising / user acquisition - this is what people never talk about with freemium games. It costs enormous amounts of money to build audiences of 100m daily active players and that is the difference between a game that does well and one that doesn't. Very few games (Flappy Bird being a notable example) get to the top 50 without an enormous marketing spend (and I'm talking hundreds of thousands of dollars). King regularly pay out $5+ per install which is much higher than the industry average.

But $1.3bn for advertising?! Isn't that too high? What medium of advertising do they use? I only see app adverts when I'm viewing websites on my phone and internet advertising isn't so expensive.